Monthly Archives: January 2016

This turned out to be a lot easier than most of this type of problem in my experience. Our new house had a built in Siemens dishwasher thrown in as part of the purchase – fortunately we didn’t pay anything for it but, with hindsight, I understand why the former owner didn’t ask for anything!

Two days after we moved in, I loaded it up with a few items and turned it on…or rather didn’t – the on/off button produced zero reaction on the front panel. OK, delve under the sink and voilà, the mains plug isn’t connected. Plug back in and repeat exercise….with exactly the same result – zippo. OK…..check the less obvious like mains water present nad ‘does the power socket have volts’ (yes to both. Eventually, tiring of this game, we removed it and replaced it with our old machine that had moved with us (on move #4 in fact, the guy in Culemborg who sold it to me back in 2000 was right about its reliability).

Once I had a few minutes to reflect, I looked through the net for any suggestions and it appears that these machines have a problem with the relay controlling the heater. Reasonable chance that may be the issue, but the damage isn’t too obvious. Anyway, take off side panel, disconnect and remove the control unit and return to bench.

Control box looks like this:

Open the cover and :

Hum….I don’t think it should look like this!

And the back cover is just as bad:

Close up view of the damage on the pcb side shows an unhappy situation

And the other side shows a dynamited capacitor and another component that presumably vapourised into that mark on the inside of the cover

All in all, very dead. My suspicion is that this is external influence – a lightening strike nearby for instance.

Only solution was to buy a replacement – I found a second hand one from the UK for 40GBP which took minutes to refit and is now functioning happily.